Internet providers band together to flag piracy

On Monday, the Center for Copyright Information (CCI) — an advocacy group that defends intellectual property — launched the Copyright Alert System (CAS), a feedback system that notifies Internet users when they’ve downloaded illegal content.

Companies and organizations, like the Recording Industry of America, that create copyrighted music, films and other media will send notices of alleged infringement to Internet service providers. They will note the user by IP address. The ISPs will then send Copyright Alerts to consumers and use “mitigation measures,” like educational videos or slowing Internet speed, to dissuade them from doing it again.

Jill Lesser, CCI’s executive director, says the program is really designed to educate and not threaten people, as was common a decade ago as the recording industry began filing lawsuits against illegal downloaders (which didn’t slow the tide at all).

“We hope we will actually not be sending a lot of fifth and sixth notices,” Lesser says. “For us, it’s reaching the casual infringer — which is a large portion of peer-to-peer piracy.”

The ISPs rolling out CAS are Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, Cablevision, and Time Warner Cable — so just about everyone in the U.S. will be a part of the program. Lesser defended the practice of slowing Internet speeds down to 256K, an unusable speed these days, as an attention-grabber.

The measure will not target public Wi-Fi networks like those found in coffee shops or the airport.

Log this away as another chapter in information’s continuing fight to be both free and expensive. Media companies want people to pay for content. As the world floods with easy alternatives to acquire that content for free, people increasingly don’t want to pony up the cash.

Typically copyrighted materials are exchanged over networks like BitTorrent, which break up the computer code behind digital materials into pieces and store those pieces with different members’ (peers) computers on the network. When another member goes to download a file — copyrighted or otherwise — the data for that file comes from those many different computers, rather than from a central server, making it more difficult to track.

Privacy advocates worry that these sorts of measures by content provides and ISPs begin to invade the right to privacy on the Internet. CCI says CAS will not share any customer information with content creators (which could ostensibly used for a lawsuit). The Tor Project, which was originally developed with the Navy in mind, has created free software and an open network designed to fight network surveillance, which it believes “threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis.”

I still remember arriving at college in 1999 and being shown this thing called Napster. Within a week I owned more music than I ever knew existed. But I also remember being told that Dr Dre and Metallica wanted to take me to court for doing so. The cat and mouse game of content ownership and monetization isn’t coming to a halt any time soon.